Talking about mental health

Posted on 07, August 2017

This book from Together’s Service User Involvement team looks at the different ways in which different types of mental distress can be described. It shows that many mental health conditions are described in very different ways by different groups of people – such as doctors, people in other parts of the world, and, most importantly, those who experience them.

This in turn helps us remember that the medical way of describing mental health problems is just one among many different ways of looking at mental distress. It shows too that clinical diagnoses often seem more negative, pessimistic and judgemental than other ways of perceiving these experiences.

We have written this book because at Together we want to demystify mental health jargon, and focus on people’s emotional experiences, personal journeys and potential, rather than pessimistic clinical diagnoses.